“My inspiration for The Bully Pulpit was the countless numbers of people who wrote mean-spirited comments about me in emails, tweets, Instagram posts, blogs and online comments sections when Wait Watchers was published online and went viral,” says artist Haley Morris-Cafiero of her new photo series on cyberbullying. Instead of responding to each of her anonymous bullies, Morris-Cafiero created a series of parodic images, staged according to the comments they left her, dressing up in costumes, wigs and prosthetics and incorporating their words by printing them onto T-shirts, or writing them on a mirror. The Bully Pulpit isn’t about retribution, but it brings attention to how extreme online bullying can be, and how difficult it is to tackle—especially if we don’t talk about it. The Bully Pulpit will be published by Fall Line Press, in association with Trolley Books and TJ Boulting, and it launches officially in a month at Offprint London.
